La concha de la lora

I can’t count the amount of hours I’ve spent pondering why “parrot vagina” or “La concha de la lora” is used as an explicative here in my dear Buenos Aires. I even tried rationalizing the expression after seeing many parrots in Los Bosques de Palermo. I thought, hm, maybe because there are so many parrots in this park, and there are also hundreds of transvestite prostitutes that work in the park after hours, maybe there’s a secret correlation between parrot and transvestite prostitutes? No. That just doesn’t make any sense. So, as with most slang expressions or words that are distinct to Buenos Aires, if you want to know their origin you should really look no further than Lunfardo. According to the “Diccionario del Lunfardo” by Athos Espíndola, a lora is:

Now this old Tango tune is quite true to this day, minus the cancan polleras. Now our lovely Loras wear 20 millimeter skirts, nike shocks, and a motorola razor in a thong. They’re still quite dangerous.

So this basically means you’re calling someone a whore and a lora is a pejorative, not a parrot. As for concha meaning vagina, well, concha is literally translated as seashell. So if you had no street experience here you might think, “parrot’s seashell? What the…” I’ll never forget the first time I heard an angry taxi driver scream it at a motorcyclist. I was in the back of a cab with a friend and she started laughing. Her English is mas-o-menos and she told me, “it’s the parrot’s vagina”, and then she started laughing again. I remember thinking to myself, “why in the hell would you scream that at a motorcyclist and, I want to see these parrots they’re screaming about!”

Well, now I know it’s basically like calling someone a whore, but in a vulgarly rude manner. Regardless, don’t say it around the kids or your mother/father in law. Keep in mind it’s great to scream when: